I’ve been meaning to post something for a while now about one of my favorite Pittsburgh sites, Bike PGH.  First off, it’s wonderfully designed both functionally and aesthetically.  It combines all the elements that a non-profit organization would have (Mission, Board, Staff, Events, etc), a ton of valuable resources to the biking community, and the art blends biking, crazy Pittsburgh topography and crazy Pittsburgh directions into an attractive and interesting visual diplay.  ClickNathan did a wonderful job.

As a non-profit/community resource website, it accomplishes its purpose beautifully, and to keep with the Waxing Blogosophically theme, also sports a blog.  Even in the current biking off-season it is updated 2-3 times a week on average, and serves up an array of content including advocacy, site news, tips for local bikers, etc.  My only complaint is that the blog is hard to find from the main page. A user either has to access it through the news menu, or see it amidst the content/link box in the sidebar, which somewhat resembles an ad.  This means that most users would have to know the blog is there to find it, which is definitely not optimal.  The blog is a great resource–don’t bury it!

This site is a good example of how a blog can be integrated into a non-profit/community site to better serve its members/interested parties and make the website come alive.

Other Waxing Blogosophically site suggestions, hit the comments or email brett at marginaldesigns dot com.

In my experience with blogging and seeing the value in such pursuits, people tend to fall in two camps: you get it or you don’t.  The group that gets it sees how blogs can be used effectively for a multitude of things, including neighborhood groups using them to build a community, businesses using them to promote goods and services, non-profits using them to further their advocacy goals, and, of course, for individuals to disseminate their personal musings.

The group that doesn’t get it, however, tends to fall back to the circa 1998 question, “Why would someone care about what time I woke up and what I ate for dinner?”

The truth is that blogging and blogging software have grown up significantly since the days when LiveJournal was king.  While there is still plenty of room for personal blogs, there are a growing number of ways that blogging is being used to do things that are new and innovative.  And, in my opinion, this has a lot to do with the software that the blogs run on.

Blogging software like Wordpress and Movable Type allow people to create sites, customize them, and deliver content more quickly and easily than in the past.  This allows sites to “come to life” in a way that pages updated through raw HTML coding and FTP never could accomplish.  Gone are (or should be) the days when businesses rely on static and seldomly updated pages to communicate their products and services.  People want to know what you’re doing now, and blogging is the perfect platform for doing that.

So, in this series of posts, I’d like to highlight some of the blogs that are using this medium in new and innovative ways.  Be on the lookout later this week for the first site, and in the meantime, let me know about some of your favorites in the comments!